Chapter Text
(Back in Shido’s Palace, just after they’d defeated the TV President, Akira suddenly decides it’s time to switch the party members around.
“Noir, switch out. Skull, Fox, get in here.”
“No healer?” Yusuke questions.
Akira considers this for a moment, before changing his decision. “…Mona, you good to go, yeah?” Morgana lifts his little paw and gives a thumbs up. “Switch with Panther.”
“Roger that.”
Ann is seething. “What? But you said before that—is this because I healed you?!”
Akira won’t look at her. “No, it’s just, you’ve been in for a while—”
“I’m fine! What the hell, Joker?”
“Panther,” he cautions, leader voice in full action. Yet his eyes are still glued to the ground.
Ann’s not having any of it. She has a hunch, and she always trusts herself when she has a hunch. “Why are we fighting so many shadows anyway? What are you looking for?” She yells.
“Ann, chill out—” Ryuji tries, a hand on her shoulder. She shakes him off her.
“No! I’m so done with this! You’re looking for him, aren’t you?”
He does look at her, then, face pale. He’s wearing an expression she’s seen before—in the attic, before they’d gone into Sae’s Palace, when they’d finally pieced everything together.
“What?” Asks Haru from where she stands next to Makoto, both having removed themselves from the main lineup.
She ignores her for the time being. She needs to get this out of Akira, and no one else. “You think he’s in here, don’t you?” She repeats, taking a step closer to him. He frowns at her, and that’s how she knows she’s right on the money.
“Panther, who?” Makoto demands, alarmed.
“Crow.”
Something in his grey eyes just… Breaks. Like he doesn’t think it, he knows it. And he knows why. His gaze drifts away from her, but she holds firm.
Akira sighs, and when he looks back to her, it’s because he knows her true intentions. What she’s really asking.
“That’s right,” he grits out.
Ann knows what a boy in love looks like.)
Futaba’s in Leblanc again, with the other three, waiting for the rest to arrive. Yusuke’s sitting next to her in the booth, Makoto is sitting at the counter, nursing a cup of coffee while texting someone, and Akechi is lurking ominously in the corner.
Ann and Ryuji come in together, shortly followed by a very tired-looking Sumire (“I’m so jet lagged, sorry!” She’d explained).
Lastly, Haru arrives. Her eyes trail around the room until she finds where Akechi is sitting, then she looks away and takes a seat next to Makoto in complete silence.
Just like old times. Almost.
Of course, Inari is the one to address the elephant in the room.
“Sumire?” He calls, and she jolts a little bit, as if trying to keep herself awake. “Are you not surprised to see Akechi alive and well?”
Akechi groans.
“Oh! I knew he was okay.” She smiles, radiant. “We text.”
Ann leans against the counter, hand on her hip. She stares directly at Akechi, unimpressed. “Do you now.”
“Can we not.”
“Well we all thought you were—”
“We don’t have time for this—”
Futaba’s phone rings, interrupting their little moment. She flips it so the screen is upright and peeks at the caller ID. “Akira is calling me,” she announces, a little too calmly.
“Don’t answer it,” Akechi hisses.
Futaba ignores him. She hits accept, puts it on speaker. “Hi, Kira.”
Akechi looks just about ready to bolt.
“Futaba! Thank god you picked up!” Comes a little kitty whisper from down the line.
All the eyes in the room suddenly zero in on Futaba’s phone. “Mona?” She exclaims. It’s not every day you get a phone call from a cat. “What’s going on? Where’s Akira?”
“He’s fine! He’s sleeping right now, I… I swiped his phone, but listen, something’s—something’s not right! Akira’s… He won’t talk to me, he won’t talk to anyone, I keep trying to get him to call you but he won’t listen to me, and I don’t know what to do!”
Futaba squeezes her eyes shut and tries her very best not to cry. She takes a big breath. “We know, Mona-mona. We’re on it.”
“What do you mean?” Morgana questions, panicked. “Wait, who’s we?”
Futaba bites her lip, lifts her head to look at Makoto for help. She gives an understanding look, then gets down from her stool and walks to the table Futaba’s phone is placed on.
“Morgana, can Akira hear you right now?”
“Makoto…? Um, no, not if I’m quiet, but wha—wait. Are you all there?”
“Alright. We’ll need you to be quiet, then. Yes, we’re all here.” She twists around to look at Akechi, who seems to be silently pleading with her. The tension lingering in the air in the long moment they spend staring at each other could cut through steel. “And Akechi,” Makoto finishes.
Immediately, the Akechi in question stands up, as if to run away again. He does that a lot. Ann and Ryuji stand in front of the door, blocking his exit.
“Akechi is there?!” Morgana shrieks.
Akechi strides towards their table so quickly that it makes multiple people jump, Futaba included. “Not so loud,” He snarls.
“But you—you died!” Morgana’s quieter now, but no less frazzled. “You sneak—did you not die after all and not tell any of us? Not tell Akira—?”
Makoto interrupts him. “Morgana, we all reacted the same as you, trust me. But we really don’t have time for this.” Akechi closes his eyes to take a deep breath in. Futaba notices Haru staring at the back of his head, a sour look on her face. “It’s good that you called, there’s something we need to talk to you—”
“Akira has a Palace, doesn’t he?”
Makoto is rendered speechless for a moment. “Yes, how did you—”
“I knew it! I knew I could sense something weird!” And, well, that explains it. Morgana’s always been a little kitty-cat-Palace-detector, after all.
“Mona?” Sounds a different voice from down the line, like it’s in the background. A sleepy, very warmly familiar voice. “What’re y’ doin?”
Akechi’s arm shoots forward lightning fast and he hits the end call button. His hand is shaking, and the look on his face is… Haunted.
“What’d you do that for!” Ryuji shouts, dumbfounded. Slow as always.
“We can’t alert him of the fact we’re infiltrating his Palace.” Akechi slumps down to sit on the booth seat in front of her. He looks very disheveled all of a sudden. “Not yet.”
“Oh, shit. Right.”
“…You think he’s onto us?” Ann asks.
Futaba thinks about it. She catches Akechi’s eyes widen for a split second. “That depends on how long Mona can keep a secret from him.”
Everyone in the room grimaces.
“Which means we need to hurry,” Makoto finishes.
“Pardon me for interrupting,” Haru speaks up, her hands clasped together. “But I’d like to know why you’ve asked all of us to gather here.” She directs the question at Akechi, but her eyes keep flicking to Makoto stood at the side of him, as if she can’t bear to look at him for too long.
Everyone in the room looks towards Akechi, and he turns his head from side to side as if he wasn’t expecting that he would have to be the one to explain things. Futaba raises an eyebrow at him.
Akechi gives a brief sigh. “Last night, the Velvet Room contacted me.” He gets up from his seat, walks behind the counter, takes a whiteboard and marker from where they were hanging on the wall—the very same whiteboard that Futaba and Sojiro would use to talk to each other while Akira was in the interrogation room, afraid that Leblanc had been bugged—and erases what was written there.
“Lavenza told me that Akira’s Palace was a problem, something they had never seen before,” he continues. “she also called me a Trickster, which I assume alludes to the fact that I can wield multiple Personas as Akira can.” He starts drawing on the whiteboard, and Futaba and the rest of them move to the counter to look at what he’s showing them. A large circle, with ten smaller circles surrounding its inner edge.
“Each of these circles,” he begins, pointing at them one by one with the pen he’s holding, “Are doors that have a major arcana from tarot written on them, and all of them have a Treasure behind them. We discovered that each door represents one of us, and can only be opened by the person it represents. Morgana and Kitagawa-kun’s doors are already open.”
“Wait, how?” Sumire questions, trying her best to follow along.
“Akira knows Mona still cares about him, so his door was open when we got there. Yusuke was able to open his because he just guessed which one it was,” Futaba explains.
Yusuke narrows his eyes at her, as if he’s hurt. “Didn’t guess. Was drawn to it.”
Futaba sticks out her tongue at him.
“Akira-senpai… Thinks we don’t care about him?” Sumire mutters, face pulled into a frown. Ann and Ryuji share a similar expression.
“Yoshizawa-san.”
“Right, sorry,” she sighs. “Please, continue.”
Akechi colours in one of the circles—Akira’s door. “This door represents Akira, and behind it, is Arsène.” Ryuji’s head perks up at that, for some reason. “Meaning that Akira has not only lost access to his own heart, but his will of rebellion also. If we assume that this door will open once all the other doors have, then we can assume that Arsène is the actual Treasure, meaning…” He pauses, hesitating for a moment. “Meaning that someone has to take him into their mask.”
“Like Akira could,” Makoto surmises, to which Akechi nods in response.
Futaba rolls her eyes. “Someone meaning you.”
Akechi glares at her. “We don’t know that.”
“Oh yeah, sure—after Lavenza only brought you to the Velvet Room because you’re a trickster or a wildcard or whatever the hell the other words are for it.” She picks up the whiteboard marker Akechi had been holding and doodles a little top hat on the circle representing Akira’s door. “She did that because any one of us could take him into our masks! For sure!”
“Okay, you’ve made your point.” He plucks the marker from her hand. “But the fact of the matter is that I don’t know how to do it.”
There’s a long silence then, the entire room without a single idea to offer.
“How did Akira do it back then?” Ann muses. “Didn’t he just, point a gun at them and tell them to get in?”
Ryuji looks at her and shrugs, as if to say yeah, basically. “He had to talk to 'em first though. Something about… Reminding 'em who they are.”
Haru brings a hand to her chin. “For some reason, I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“I agree,” Makoto chimes in. “We need to know for sure. If only we could go into Mementos to try it out.”
After a small silence, every thief in deep thought, Ryuji is suddenly taking his phone out of his pocket. “Well, why can’t we? If the Nav is back, and there’s a Palace and stuff, shouldn’t Mementos be there?”
Futaba shuts him down immediately. “Negative. Mementos was there because someone was ruling over it.” Then, upon seeing the kicked-puppy look on his face, she feels bad and adds; “But I guess there’s no harm in trying.”
He must take that as an OK, as she watches him immediately unlock his phone and tap the Nav’s icon. “Mementos,” he speaks into it, and the entire room seems to hold its breath.
No candidates found.
The text-to-speech voice of the Nav crackles as it speaks, almost as if it’s glitching. Weird. (She’ll take a look at that later.)
Nothing happens. Reality remains intact.
“Dang.”
“Not an option, then,” Makoto says, turning to face Akechi. “We won’t know if it’ll work until we go into the Palace again. You’ll have one chance. Are you okay with that?”
Akechi’s eyes widen a little. “You… You’re okay with that?”
Makoto frowns. “What do you mean?”
“I… Just would’ve thought that—” He shakes his head like he’s trying to physically shake the thought away. “Nothing. Nevermind.”
Next to Makoto, Haru takes a deep breath, as if she’s about to say something—but quickly turns her head away.
The room falls into silence for a moment. Yusuke breaks it.
“We should try match the rest of the arcanas.”
Makoto nods, and Futaba notices that her hand has slipped into Haru’s. “Good thinking. It’s best to be prepared. Did you write down which ones there were, Yusuke?”
“I did. Just a moment,” He replies, getting up from his seat to grab his bag from the other side of the room. He roots around in it before taking out one of his sketchbooks. He places it on the table for them all to look at.
“Let’s see here. The Fool, who do we think that is?”
Futaba remembers. “That was Akira’s door.”
Ann’s expression sours. “That’s kinda mean. Is he calling himself stupid or something?”
Akechi chuckles, almost too quiet to be heard. “No, it’s not like that. It means something different in tarot, the Fool is—new opportunities. Someone embarking on a journey.”
“You know about this stuff, Akechi?”
He thinks about it for a second. “No, not really. I just happened to remember that one.”
Futaba calls bullshit, but whatever.
She picks the sketchbook up and sets it down in front of her. She writes Akira next to The Fool. “Inari, which one was yours again?”
“The Emperor. Morgana’s was the Magician.
She writes down their names, too. “Alright, someone google tarot cards and what they mean. We’re going through them one-by-one.”
“Got it,” Sumire responds, taking her phone out. “One second… Um, I think I found a website that works? Here.”
Sumire’s phone joins the sketchbook on the table. She scrolls down on the website until she finds a definition for The Empress. “This one, The Empress, means… Creativity. Divine feminine energy. Ooh, gotta be Ann, right?”
At the sound of her own name, Ann’s head lifts up. “Me? Uh, I dunno. Am I creative?”
She turns to Ryuji, who shrugs.
She pinches him. “Asshole.”
“Wh—Hey! You asked!”
Makoto sighs. “We’ll skip that one for now. What’s the next one?”
Futaba scrolls down on the website again. “Justice.” She reads the meaning aloud, too lazy to paraphrase. “You understand cause and effect, and that your choices have consequences. You seek to equalise and balance, finding the fairest outcome for all.” Futaba has no idea.
She figures she’s not alone in that, as no one in the room speaks up.
“We skipping that one too, then?”
“This may be more harm than it’s worth,” Yusuke drones.
Makoto nods. “There’s a few people that could be. I think it’d be best to just write the meanings down and take them in with us. It’s getting late, anyway.”
Takamaki ambushes Goro as soon as he steps outside of Leblanc.
“So. We need to talk.”
Goro feels a little like he’s standing before a wildcat that’s found its prey. Even still, he doesn’t run. “Good evening, Takamaki-san. What do we need to talk about?”
The wildcat goes straight for his neck. “Akira.” Then, she adds; “Come out with me?”
“Out? Out where?”
“There’s a quiet little bar a couple streets over. Unless you wanna have this conversation in Yongen’s backstreets.”
Goro pauses, turns to face her fully.
“You want me,” he begins, thinking he’s somehow reading the situation wrong, or even misheard her. “To come to a bar. With you.”
Ann tuts at him. “You’re not diseased, Akechi. And I can go to a bar with whoever I want.”
“That’s—that’s not what I was insinuating, and you know it.” He glances at Leblanc’s door to the left of him. “What I meant to say, is that you are asking me, the person who orphaned the girl whose home we are currently standing outside of—to come to a bar with you.”
She delivers a moderate punch to his shoulder. He feels the long, painted nail of her thumb dig into him through his coat, and he once again comes to the realisation that maybe Panther wasn’t so stupid a code-name for her after all.
Ann throws her head back, her blonde hair going all over the place. “Jesus Christ. You just gotta make things so difficult all the time. Come to the god-damn bar with me. What are you so scared of? This isn’t a plot to murder you or something.”
Goro brushes down the shoulder of his coat. “No, that doesn’t seem quite your style.”
When he looks back at her, she has an eyebrow raised, waiting for a response from him. He doesn’t think she’s going to take no for an answer.
“I’ll come with you,” he tells her, regretting it as the words leave his mouth.
With it being a weekday, the bar they arrive at is mostly barren of customers, save for two men in suits sitting on the stools and chatting leisurely. Ann ushers Goro off to a small table in the outside seating area, then all but marches to the bar to order drinks for, presumably, the both of them. He’s glad she hadn’t asked what he’d wanted, as he hasn’t the faintest idea of what he’d have said. She returns with their drinks minutes later—some exceedingly sugary looking concoctions, complete with whipped-cream and some form of sprinkles atop them.
“Akira used to work at a bar, y’know,” she tells him as she sits down across from him. “I never went, but I can definitely imagine it.”
Goro frowns at the drink she puts in front of him, inspects it with his straw. “He had a multitude of part-time jobs, yes. To pay for your gear in the Metaverse, I would imagine.” He decides to be brave, and takes a sip. It’s like drinking an ice cream sundae, but it isn’t bad. “Not everything could be paid for with Mementos money,” he continues, when he remembers he has a point to make.
Ann hums in affirmation. “Good?” She asks, gesturing to his drink.
“It’s… Sweet. Is there even alcohol in it?”
Ann shrugs. “No clue. I chose it based on the picture on the menu.” Goro holds in a laugh.
“Why do you think Akira has a Palace?” She asks, pretending at that being an even remotely befitting way of changing the subject. The Phantom Thieves, Ann included, seem to excel at not giving Goro enough time to even breathe before firing at him the very same questions that keep him awake at night.
At his hesitance, she speaks up again. “Okay, I know why, it’s more like… I don’t get how. How does this happen to a guy who shot two gods in the face?”
“Maruki wasn’t a god.”
She drains about half the liquid in her glass, closes her eyes in satisfaction. “He might as well’ve been. You weren’t there, but his Persona was just as big as the God of Control had been, and he shot that too.”
Goro recalls Akira telling him about the day the world had ended, in the chill of Yongen’s laundromat years ago. A small, selfish part of him used to wish he had been there to see it, but he now knows what a foolish thought that is. It’d have been impossible—the game had been rigged from the start, after all.
The answer to her question is right there in front of her, in the very words she’d used to ask it. Yes, Akira had felled those gods, but no corpses remained, no one was able to watch them rot. He scattered the playing board, abolished the game entirely, snatched reality itself from the hands of a madman and bent it back into shape—and had then been put on a train back to his boring hometown in the countryside, as if none of it ever happened in the first place. Akira forming a Palace, from Goro’s perspective, makes all the sense in the world, Metaverse rules be damned.
But Ann doesn’t see it that way. “During that year in Tokyo, Joker’s whole life revolved around having people need him. He made it his purpose.” Goro’s mind floods with Akira. Akira, and his nonsensical ideal that any kind of relationship with anyone could only be maintained after some sort of deal had been struck. Akira, bending over backwards for anyone and everyone with the mastery of a circus acrobat, too preoccupied with the act to notice he was shattering his own bones in the process. “Now, well. Now he understands that people no longer need him—and is too stubborn to realise that it’s okay for him to need them, for once. So he resolved to remain alone.” Because he’s an idiot, he barely manages to stop himself from adding.
He’s a hypocrite, after all. In retrospect, Goro is an idiot, too.
Ann just stares at him, eyes blown-wide with something like hurt, distress. Goro is steadily learning that the only thing the Phantom Thieves ever have to offer at the face of their precious leader’s atrophy is a pained expression.
“Or, so I would assume,” he says, wary of the fact that he’d essentially just read Akira’s mind, out loud, when the other was in a completely different part of the country. And had not seen him in two years.
The lie doesn’t convince Ann, he realises when her expression changes. “That. What was that? How can you just do that?” She questions, as if Goro’s prior thoughts on mind-reading had somehow played for her to hear. “Akira never talks about himself, like ever. So how do you just know that?”
“Is it not obvious?”
“Nothing about Akira is ever obvious.”
And that’s—
(Akira is angry, Goro realises as Maruki Takuto exits Leblanc, the bell jingling gleefully as he goes. Angrier than he’d seen any rage status ailment ever make him. However, perhaps more obviously, Akira is upset.
Goro can handle anger. Anger has been one of his closest allies for as long as he can remember. Definitely before Loki, before Isshiki, before Shido. Certainly before Robin. Now that he thinks about it, that anger had likely been at his side even before the morning he’d found his mother’s body in the bathtub, simmering in wait, a hand grenade at his belt. The pin on it pulled, as if it’d reacted almost chemically to the stench of her blood in the air, and blew up on its own.
Sadness, however, is not one of his strong suits.
“You knew,” Akira states. His voice does not shake, but it’s a near thing.
“I did. Not from the get-go, but coming to the conclusion wasn’t difficult.”
Morgana, sitting in the booth beside Akira, glances wildly between them with his big blue eyes. Then, he jumps down from the seat and skitters off upstairs. Privately, in his mind, Goro thanks him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Goro leans against the counter. “You know why.”
Immediately, “No, Akechi. I don’t.”
He’s lying. He just wants to hear Goro say it. That’s what they do—Goro understands Akira, almost perfectly, but refuses to speak it into existence lest Akira gets used to someone seeing through all of his tricks, and decides he wants them to stay. And Akira, he knows Goro understands. But he needs to hear it anyway, as if it’s impossible for him to fully believe it until the words are laid out in front of him as proof.
Goro will give him his proof, just this once. He’s dead come tomorrow, anyway.
“Because I knew it would shake your resolve,” he answers, and he recognises that his words are overly cruel the second he speaks them—but Goro is a cruel creature, Akira knows this, no point in concealing it now. “I knew that you’d view this as a failure on your part, that I am the one person you could not save, no matter how hard you tried.”
Akira’s mouth parts, but he says nothing.
“But it doesn’t matter,” he continues, gritting his teeth. “I refuse to let it matter.”
“It doesn’t matter?” Akira mimics, as if it’s the most baffling thing he’s ever heard. Maybe it is. He gets out of his seat, stands in front of Goro as the rival and equal he always has been. “You think you don’t matter?”
To me? Is left unsaid, but Goro hears it loud and clear.
To hell with it.
“It. Doesn’t. Matter,” Goro hisses, like the vicious animal he is. There is a shovel in his hands, and a hole in front of him that he’s never been able to force himself to stop digging. A part of him that always knew that one day, he would be so far underground that the daylight sky above him would appear as no more than a small dot. “Because tomorrow, we are going to go into Maruki’s Palace to take him down, and I am going to die.”
He pierces his shovel into the dirt once more.
“Or are you really so spineless that you’d fold over some bullshit, trivial threat on my life?”
Akira punches him. Hard.
The impact of it sends him down to the ground on his back. Akira tumbles down with him, grasps at his coat’s collar as if doing so will somehow tether him here, manipulate both realities to make it so Goro never died in the first place.
“This isn’t trivial!”
“It is. It doesn’t change anything.”
“Please,” Akira says, his eyes finally welling with tears. Goro isn’t sure he really knows what he’s asking for. There’s never an answer. Never a right path.
Kurusu Akira in tears is a terrifying prospect. But Goro takes a breath, storms onwards. “I want to hear you say it aloud. What do you intend to do?”
There’s a sharp, wet intake of breath he thinks could maybe have been a laugh. “I won’t fold. I won’t do that to you,” his head sags forwards, any further and he’d be resting it on Goro’s chest. “But, I... I just—!” He cries, screwing his eyes shut. “Please. I need you to know.”
Whatever Akira is about to tell him, Goro already knows. He knows it better than he knows anything. His heart sinks, down out of his back and through Leblanc’s wooden floorboards, miles further down than the hole he’s dug for himself stretches.
Why, he doesn’t know, but he cups a hand against Akira’s cheek and moves upwards to kiss him. Perhaps because Akira was going to do it anyway, and chances to get ahead of him are scarce. Him not taking this one would go against everything.
Akira tastes like coffee and tears.
And life, and fire, and a storm he was never brave enough to traverse.)
“That’s ridiculous,” Goro says to Ann, who has now finished her drink. He takes another sip of his. “You just need to know where to look. He’s like me. All masks and camoflauge because he doesn’t want you to figure him out. But you figured me out easy enough, back then, so do the same for him.”
Her expression sours. “He figured you out.” Goro picks up some whipped-cream with his straw. God, these people are like children. Is there no end to the list of things they demand to have spelled-out for them on the fucking chalkboard? “I got a question.”
Goro, mid-way through licking cream off his straw, raises an eyebrow. “Go on, then.”
“Back at Leblanc, when we were going through the arcana thingys… Why didn’t you say you were Justice?”
Justice, justice, justice.
Why didn’t he? It’s unquestioning, almost absolute, that he is. He remembers the feeling that washed over him when he caught sight of the door in Akira’s Palace. Remembers how the word would haunt him at night.
This is how your justice ends.
“Following the description Sakura-san provided, it seemed… Insensitive, to bring it up.”
“But you’re sure that’s the one you are?”
Goro nods. He’s sure, alright.
Ann plonks her handbag on the table and takes her phone out. “Great! I’ll text the group chat. Oh—I’ll add you back into it too.”
A terrible idea, but terrible ideas somehow going smoothly is yet another thing that the Phantom Thieves seem to excel at.
Ann retreats back to the bar once Goro finishes his drink to fetch more for them (Please, nothing too sweet, he’d requested). When she returns, she has another question for him.
“Which one do you think I am?” She asks, almost excitedly.
An image of Okumura Haru and her death stare crash-lands into his mind.
“Not the Empress.”